Of Saints and Shadows

ANNOTATION

A brilliant new vampire novel by a Bram Stoker Award-winner. P.I. Peter Octavian is drawn into a search for a stolen book--the handbook of a secret sect of the Catholic Church used as a tool to purge vampires from the Earth. And he'll do almost anything to find it--because Peter is also a vampire. Original.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Christopher Golden Talks Vampires and Fiction
by Douglas Clegg

Christopher Golden may just be one of the most prolific authors around. He's sold more than 23 novels, the bestselling X-Men trilogy Mutant Empire, as well as a bestselling series of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" novels, which he cowro te with Nancy Holder. His recent projects include /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?&isbn=0399144 501">X-MEN: CODENAME WOLVERINE and the popular /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?&isbn=0671024337">BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: THE WATCHER'S GUIDE. Also, in May, Pocket Books will launch a quarterly series of young adult books, the first entitled BODY BAGS. In comics, Golden has signed to do a Batman: Elseworlds project for DC Comics, novels, novelizations, nonfiction -- is there anything the guy can't do? Still, first and foremost, he's an imaginative and prodigious talent who never lets genre boundaries hold him back, and his new novel, OF MASQUES AND MA RTYRS, is no exception.

Tired of the same old vampire stories, the voluptuous tales of heaving bosoms, sexy, homoerotic undead, and purple prose? Look no further -- Christopher Golden has reinvented the vampire myth into nonstop action, suspense, and fascinating dark fan tasy. Meet Peter Octavian, leader of the coven of Shadows, part of a group of renegade vampires who attempt to keep the vampire world from spinning out of balance. They protect human life as much as is possible from the darker vampires, who enjoy carnage and chaos. Although the Shadows can shapeshift, they're not above using modern ammunition and hand-to-hand fighting to keep their bad-boy vampire cousins in line. This, the third in The Shadow Saga, which began with OF SAINTS AND SHADOWS, is Golden's best yet. I had a few minutes with Christopher Golden and learned more about his approach to writing, imagination, and vampires.

Douglas Clegg:  What drew you to vampires? What about them intrigues you? Do you think it's a subgenre of fantasy and horror that can be exhausted, or is it an endless source of ideas?

Christopher Golden:  I've always loved vampire stories, but that isn't why I wrote this series. Its creation was prompted, actually, by one of the fundamental questions of the mythological world I've created. If vampires could transform themselves, on a molecular level, into mist or a wolf or a bat, isn't it silly that they would have to stop there? From that, I began to craft a reason why vampires would believe such things to be true, and the story grew in both directions. As to the latt er question, I truly believe that as long as there are imaginative writers, there will be new twists on the subgenre. It's all about the careful choosing of story elements, and how those elements are then structured.

DC:  Where do the ideas come from? I'm being a bit arch, since this is a typical interviewer question, but you seem to have an especially rich treasure trove of ideas, and the energy to put them down on paper in imaginative ways.

CG:  The publishing world moves a bit too slow, actually. And that's an understatement. The three Shadow Saga books, of which OF MASQUES AND MARTYRS is the latest, are really one major idea with several hundred little ideas thrown in. I 'm fortunate enough to have ideas coming at me from several different angles. From dreams, of course. From spur-of-the-moment inspiration, which no one can really explain. For instance, my son watching "Winnie-the-Pooh" videos over and over, creati ng within me a certain perverse hostility toward those characters, even though I love them, was the inspiration for my upcoming Signet novel, STRANGEWOOD [due in September 1999.] And then there are economic motivators, of course. For instance, Hey, this is suddenly hot, but it bores me...on the other hand, if you twisted it around and did something similar, but nasty...hmmm. Some of my best ideas for work-for-hire projects have come about in that way. Or the "How come they've never don e this?" angle. That's common as well.

If you split my work between original and work-for-hire, I guess I would break it down this way: In work-for-hire, I want to get the characters I'm doing down on paper exactly right. I want to re-crea te them at their fundamental level. If I can do that, I feel like I've succeeded. In my original work, however, the motivations are completely different. I don't mind using an element of this or that, but whatever I choose to do, I want to do in a way that I've never seen before.

SYNOPSIS

Book One in the Shadow Saga is a brilliant epic that takes you into the secret world of vampires--and a secret society sworn to destroy them. Sweeping, sensuous, and shocking, it is a powerful vision of immortality that will hold you in its spell...forever.

FROM THE CRITICS

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